Film Review: Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen is an incredibly productive filmmaker and has made an average of nearly one film a year for the last forty years or so. It’s been so in recent years that you can pretty much count on a new Woody film will be released every year. He does not like to sit idly and is always working. But doing films at this speed also means that he might not always be in the best shape, artistically speaking, and for the past decade or so, Woody’s films have largely not been up to par.

His newest film, Midnight in Paris, thankfully breaks this trend. While it’s not the best he’s done this century, Vicky Christina Barcelona and Match Point were more accomplished and clever, it’s a considerable step up from his last two films, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and Whatever Works.

The movie tells the story of a young writer (Owen Wilson) who’s on a trip with his wife and in-laws in Paris. He falls in love with the city and starts taking walks during the nights, rather than going clubbing with his wife, who’s less fond of the city. When the clock strikes midnight on one of these nights, he finds himself travelling through time to Paris in the 1920’s, where he meets people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Salvador Dalí.

The idea behind the movie is brilliant and Woody has a lot of fun with it. It’s a movie about nostalgia as well as the role of the artist. Wilson’s character has artistic self-esteem problems, as he can’t help comparing himself to other writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and thinks he’s wasting his time with his day job, as a Hollywood script doctor. But when he finally meets those guys he finds out that even they had similar problems. This is also a love story and a movie about finding yourself and making choices, told in a very simple way.

Midnight in Paris is for the most part a charming, funny and beautiful film. Darius Khondji’s cinematography brings out the best of Paris and creates a marvelous atmosphere and the movie is filled with lovely music. It’s really just a beautiful piece of fluff with some deep ideas put forward very simply.

However, the film could have played its ideas out in a cleverer way. Many of the old masters Wilson meets come across as silly caricatures; they’re more a collection of cliches about the people than the characters themselves. This is clearly at least semi-intentional as the film could probably never bring full justice to all these masters in a mere 90 minutes and is not supposed to do so anyway, but it’s sometimes gets a little too silly. For instance, when Wilson meets Salvador Dalí (nicely played by Adrien Brody), Allen simply has Dalí saying his name over again and again, and talking about rhinoceros. In short, it’s Salvador Dalí saying “Hi, I’m Salvador Dalí and I’m a really weird guy. Ain’t I weird?” It’s kinda funny but also kinda stupid and it’s easy to imagine that something a bit more clever could have been done with Dalí. Something similar can be said about the treatment Hemingway gets. But then there are other characters, like Gertrude Stein, wonderfully played by Kathy Bates, who does get fleshed out more and comes across as an interesting character.

Another thing is that the films’ themes are simply spelled out literally. The message is made pretty clear, maybe a little too clear. Midnight in Paris is not as sloppily written as many recent Allen movies, the dialogue is certainly considerably less stilted than it’s been in most of his recent films, but it also rarely as sharp as, say, Manhattan or The Purple Rose of Cairo. It’s a clever and funny film but not quite as inspired as it could have and should have been (almost there, though). Still, it gives plenty of food for thought and while some things are too blatantly spelled out, it does make you think about the meaning of nostalgia and what makes an artist.

Owen Wilson does a good job playing the Woody stand-in and it would be nice to see the two of them work together again. He speaks Allen’s dialogue and has all the elements of your average Allen protagonist, but does not imitate Allen himself (unlike Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity, for example), making the character his own and still fitting quite nicely into the world of Woody Allen.

Final verdict: Midnight in Paris is a sweet, charming Woody Allen flick that’s clearly among the better he’s made this century, but still not quite as inspired or moving as his best work. The humor and philosophy is a tad on the nose at times and it could have played smarter with the concept. Still, it’s a lot of fun and very charming.